Staff: Mentor

When De Broglie proposed it Einstein knew it was wrong, but a very important step in elucidating the quantum puzzle.

Schrodinger was challenged that if particles have wave aspects then it must have a wave equation. He found one - Schrodinger's equation - but goofed - his derivation was erroneous:https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0653

But then things rapidly progressed and Einsteins intuition was proven correct - as was usually the case. It was done away with at the end of 1926 when Dirac came up with his transformation theory the combined Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and even the lesser known Dirac q numbers approach, into the one theory, the tranformation theory, that generally goes by the name QM today: http://www.lajpe.org/may08/09_Carlos_Madrid.pdf

Schrodinger was disgusted, and wished he never became involved with the whole thing. Einstein thought it wrong and started a crusade to prove it wrong - but failed - admitting at the end it was correct, but till his dying day believed incomplete ie an approximation to an even deeper theory that conformed more to his intuition about the world. The thing about Einstein is he was amongst the greatest - people with amazingly quick minds that dazzled everyone - people like Von-Neumann and Feynman. They were much better mathematicians, and had far greater technical ability than Einstein. What set him apart was his ability to penetrate to the heart of a problem. In that he was unmatched. He saw straight away wave-particle duality was wrong - but struggled til his dying day to find out what was right and appealed to his intuition on how the world worked. Will he be proven right in the end - it hard to bet against a man like him.

But - it's not wave particle duality they are demonstrating - its simply quantum behavior that is similar to waves. As I said wave particle duality is wrong, and was realised as wrong by no less a person than Einstein when first proposed - but a very important advance none-the-less that was part of the final resolution of the quantum puzzle - just as Einstein's intuition said it would be. I think his words were something like it has lifted one small corner of how nature works.

But - it's not wave particle duality they are demonstrating - its simply quantum behavior that is similar to waves. As I said wave particle duality is wrong, and was realised as wrong by no less a person than Einstein when first proposed - but a very important advance none-the-less that was part of the final resolution of the quantum puzzle - just as Einstein's intuition said it would be. I think his words were something like it has lifted one small corner of how nature works.

Thanks
Bill

Thank you for this answer. The problem is that the term wave-particle duality is one of the most widely used concepts in QM.

But what is the alternative explanation that you can offer? you used an obscure description "it is wave like", the standard model says it is just a wave of probabilities, some physicists insist that it is a real wave:

"physicists come to a working understanding of it through its use to calculate measurement outcome probabilities through the Born Rule. Tomographic methods can reconstruct the wavefunction from measured probabilities. In contrast, we demonstrated a method to directly measure the wavefunction so that its real and imaginary components appear straight on our measurement apparatus"http://www.photonicquantum.info/Research.html#Interaction-Free_Measurement_continued

When talking about single photon or electron, I can digest the idea that the particle can behave like a wave (maybe it was a wave all the time), but when talking about massive object this concept became very hard to digest, I was never a fan of Pilot-wave theory (because I think it is incomplete and was not tested extensively), but when I was thinking about the particular case of a massive object behaving like a wave, pilot-wave theory offered an elegant solution that clicked for me!

I imagine deep in my thoughts that part of pilot-wave is true, and part of the standard model is true. Maybe one day someone can combine both of them in one elegant theory.

..
..
When talking about single photon or electron, I can digest the idea that the particle can behave like a wave (maybe it was a wave all the time), but when talking about massive object this concept became very hard to digest, I was never a fan of Pilot-wave theory (because I think it is incomplete and was not tested extensively), but when I was thinking about the particular case of a massive object behaving like a wave, pilot-wave theory offered an elegant solution that clicked for me!

I imagine deep in my thoughts that part of pilot-wave is true, and part of the standard model is true. Maybe one day someone can combine both of them in one elegant theory.

Bear in mind that a photon is massless but electrons and protons and suchlike have mass. We know that light interferes with light, but, as you say it is hard to imagine how a solid body 'interferes'.

My own belief is that the masive particles are not and cannot be waves, nor do they need to be. It is the formulae we use to calculate probabilities ( in the absence of good localization data) that have wavelike properties.